Dylan Rodrigues

the first two episodes were great!! and I was always a Park Jun-hyun stan but, damn, she is killing it. give her more romantic roles pls! but I'm becoming a fan of potato boy too...

try jdramas instead lol, that's what helped me. but the kdramas this season also seem interesting.

she's so pretty! I loved her in About Time but I dropped that drama and her other ones don't look that good either T-T

You're right!! I was so confused lol

No, are you talking about Lee Yu-min? That's the coach's daughter, not the person I was talking about. Park Jun-young seems to be the lady who's angry at FL for the bribery thing.

The one who is angry with the FL.

Wait, so the eonni and ML are siblings?? How come they showed no reaction at seeing a family member when they passed by each other at the bar & the tournament in the beginning of the episode?

Are they really related? Idk about that one.

Honestly, first episode was really good??? I started this bc I like Park Junhyun and despite me not liking sports or badminton, I really enjoyed the first ep.

I first saw and loved her in Extracurricular but her role in APOYM was underrated!

I want to watch that drama for her but I'm scared bc of the relationship messiness lol

1. That's Gong Hee-cheol, a high ranked celebrity educator. I don't think that his salary would necessarily reflect all the other employees at the company, like e.g. the cleaning lady or the security guard or the even the rank & file education assistants.

2. He may have integrity but winning the game of capitalism isn't exactly an indicator of morality, and vice versa. He has been an absolute asshole to literally everyone around him - being rude and cold is one thing but forcing people to work overtime? refusing to let them take holidays? needlessly going overboard on whichever underling crossed him, including a kid who wanted to stand up for his mom? verbally abusing his secretaries? that's too much. it's a lot more than just being unforgiving or uncaring about other people's feelings.
Just because he had a traumatic childhood doesn't mean he's allowed to be a dick towards other human beings around him. So that doesn't justify his behaviour in the slightest.

3. The whole working his way up... that's the whole "pulled yourself up by your bootstraps" thing. Again, winning capitalism isn't a license to be cruel to everyone around him. And like I've said, he went a little bit more beyond snide remarks. His lesson should be to... not abuse the people under him just because he has more money and power. If anything, the fact he started from an unprivileged background should make him more sympathetic to those less fortunate than him but it's the opposite, as is the case IRL too.

I mean, the vindictiveness and casual cruelty that's been depicted in the drama could drive anyone to suicide. It's a diff case, but LSN herself before her epiphany thought his ill treatment alone caused her cancer, it's at that level. And the reason he doesn't have a support network is because he has driven them all away by his own behaviour and actions, And we know he's able to act like a caring person, e.g. Segi before the betrayal and LSN now. I extended my sympathy to Sehee bc she was hounded to suicide by a powerful man who held all the cards (although as you say, we still don't know the whole story) and only faced to lose, what, money? which he already has a lot of? while she could lose her livelihood and, well, her life.

This episode has shown that he *doesn't* have the capability to reflect. He still thinks of himself as the victim, he doesn't have empathy or ability to put himself in his former employees' shoes, to see how his actions hurt them and caused them to turn against him. he doesn't even remember them. I feel like he would have still hated LSN or not he did anything wrong to her if he hadn't found out she was "dying' or fallen in love with her.

I mean, isn't that the point of art? We all bring our interpretations to it. At the end of day, we pretty much have our own meanings and opinions based on what we watched. And that's especially important in the case of dramas, because a lot of them revolve around the lives of rich people and the powerful. The way they treat poor and working class characters is important especially in the light of SK and wider society. Art reflects real life and versa. There's a reason why SK makes so many dramas about class divide and the effects of capitalism. And the writers seem to be very concerned about deconstructing and examining all the usual tropes we see in kdramas; in this case, in my view, they seem to be deconstructing the idea of the "cold but misunderstood CEO" trope and showing what the consequences of such a person are in real life.

That comes to whether you think revenge is justified and when. I think in some cases, revenge is needed and especially in this one. I mean, they are workers standing up against a wealthy and powerful CEO. He has all the power in the situation because of his wealth, status and position. So I will not begrudge or judge LSN and any of the other employees from the ways they got payback, bc that was probably the only tools they had available to them.And ofc they didn't speak up - they probably wanted to keep working so they could feed themselves and/or their families. Go-jin is the type of asshole who'd fire them or make their lives if they tried to speak up. So they went Segi, because they thought he'd more approachable, they didn't know he had an agenda of his own. And saying just find another job places an onus on the workers, not the employers who should be fixing the problem. Especially since finding another job isn't an easy task and most capitalist entities are just as exploitative or dehumanizing in this dystopia we live in.If anything, I'm impressed they were willing to have the courage to fight back any way they could or at least plan to.

Yes, I know that's capitalism. That's the thing: I'm not a fan of capitalism, to put it mildly, or its practitioners like NGJ or Sooyoung, etc.

Sure, the layoffs thing is fair. But from what we've been shown, working there isn't great anyways, based on how the workers are treated and they're paid. Like in real life, most workers there seem to have three options: being badly treated and underpaid at NGJ's company, the same at some other company or not working at all. None of which are palatable choices. And as for the stockholders, as we saw from the board, most of them are just as wealthy as Go-jin and his other CEO nemeses. So again, not a demographic I'm gonna shed a tear for.

The ML built the company from zero... But now he's forgotten what it's like to be at zero, which is why he treats his employees and the needy like trash. He's forgotten his roots and treats his former fellow working class people horribly bc he's become rich now. Or maybe he was always an awful person idk. As for students not getting the best service... Isn't that the beauty of capitalism, or so I've been told, where there are a lot of other good services that would accomplish the same? Otherwise, Baek Edu or Ilpum wouldn't be such a threat.

Well, I guess? Banks and other massive corporations are absolutely entities I feel no sympathy for whatsoever. If anything, they steal from workers and farmers every day. So if it's gonna be rich man & his massive corporation's profit margin vs the needs of the workers, I'm gonna root for the latter.

And yeah, I feel bad for the team that worked on the study guide. No one deserves to have their hard work stolen. But they aren't losing money, the company is. You could argue that because of that the theft would be bad for business and make paying the team's salary difficult, bht I'm sure the CEO and the top executives can cut their own salaries instead of the workers'.

And, again, industrial espionage in order to survive financially still does not warrant harassment or being blackballed out of the industry. I'm def going to look askance at an uber wealthy CEO taking revenge on workers.

But we've seen firsthand on be treats employees. For secretaries, it's hell on earth. But even employees, it's either rudeness at best or, more importantly, awful working conditions at worst. The latter we've seen him show approval of, so I don't think Segi is solely responsible for them, if at all. Which implies he's either responsible got them existing or is fine with them being in place. Idk which is worse.

And as for the ways the employees get back at him... These are working and middle class people who are being exploited by a rich CEO in a notoriously conservative and hypercapitalistic society. The law and social mores are stacked against them. In such an environment, that must have seemed the only route available to them.

The only victim here would be the major corporation and their profits, tho. She was stealing study guides with the intention of selling to another company, I'm guessing based on what we've already seen done. The students won't be hurt since they'll still be getting the study guide, the company's profit would be. Which, yeah, I'm not gonna exactly shed a tear for.

Industrial espionage does not warrant harassment or blackballing to level of being driven to suicide. Or imprisonment 😬😬

Pretty sure the kidnapper is a diff person. Ppl are saying she's the stalker who pretend to be his fiancee and that low-key also makes sense. NGJ is beyond rude lol. This is verbally abuses his secretaries 24/7, is needlessly rude and cold to his employees and won't even let his employees leave on time or take the holidays they are entitled to. He IS the reason for everyone else's misery.

Also what axe does Sooyoung's secretary have to grind against Go-jin? Did one of his loved ones also commit suicide bc of NGJ?